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Android Wear Watch Face API Coming Soon

Perhaps Android Wear’s most important point of customization is the watch face. It’s a little surprising, then, that Wear doesn’t yet have an API for watch faces, meaning developers who have so far released custom watch faces have had to work around limitations of Wear’s most recent iteration.

That’s changing, though, perhaps not nearly fast enough. Google’s own Wayne Piekarski announced on Google+ that an official API is in the works, due out “soon.”

That comes with a caveat, unfortunately – a number of the API’s planned features, like working across form factors and manipulating the Google card stream, won’t be available until Android L is finalized this fall.

In the meantime, Piekarski suggests that developers post custom watch faces to Google Play through Beta and Alpha channels, rather than publicly – current third-party faces tap into an unpublished API, which he suggested could break when the new API is released.